The Big Winner

California lets candidates cross party lines in primaries, but never once had a candidate for Governor won the nomination of both major parties.* It took able, vote-getting Republican Governor Earl Warren to break the record. Last week, with a 700,000-vote lead, he captured his own party. That was expected. What made politicians' eyes pop was that he also captured the Democratic Party nomination, by 73,000 votes.

Republicans found new confidence in the result. Earl Warren had rolled over the C.I.O.-P.A.C., and with it the other ramparts of the Democratic Party. GOPoliticians, sniffing the air, smelled game in the era of Truman Democracy in quantities the party had not scented in years of the New Deal. Democrats looked at the California results with somber amazement--November's elections were drawing uncomfortably close.

The man Warren beat for the Democratic nomination was witty, jowly Attorney General Robert Kenny, who keeps his eye on political horses, ready to jump on the fast ones. He thought a Roman ride on the Democratic Party and the C.I.O.'s Political Action Committee would win the race. Both pulled up lame.

Warren stumped on his record. Said he: "I have been unable to draw from my opponent anything that could be considered an indictment of my administration." He was right. His safe & sane record left Kenny and P.A.C. little to snipe at. He had occasionally appointed able Democrats to state office. He had cut taxes, at the same time extended unemployment compensation, and proposed state medical insurance. He had got higher old age pensions--always a popular issue in California--passed by the Legislature.

The American Way. P.A.C. backed Kenny on the assumption that he was P.A.C.-minded, at least more so than Earl Warren. The supporters from the left flooded the mails with Kenny postcards. At the last minute, Fredric March, Olivia de Havilland, and Danny Kaye, members of the Hollywood Independent Citizens' Committee (swimming-pool pinks), plumped for Kenny on the radio. But all was wasted.

For P.A.C. there was no consolation anywhere in California. P.A.C.-backed, fellow-traveling Congressman Ellis Patterson was snowed under for the Democratic Senatorial nomination by Will Rogers Jr., a regular Democrat. Rogers will face conservative Senator William Knowland, G.O.P. choice, in the November finale.

Ruefully, P.A.C. listened to the reactions. Some Democrats were howling indignantly "that P.A.C. had been like a millstone around our neck." Said a Southern California Democrat: "The people have decided that the ultra-left wing is not working in the best interests of our country. It is working selfishly and not in a thoroughly American way. One of these days the C.I.O. and the P.A.C. will have to prove that they do not take orders from outside the United States."

For P.A.C., at least California's P.A.C., that was that. But the big fact was that in a big state, a state which has sometimes decided national elections, a state which had previously supported the New Deal, a big Republican swept the board clean.

*Only two men ever won re-election to the Governor's chair in California: John Bigler, a '49er, in 1853; Hiram Johnson, in 1914.

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